Uber burns its 2026 AI budget in four months, and the comments are skeptical

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Hey -- it's the cat. The thing with actual teeth today is the Uber / Claude Code budget story, which pulled 469 comments on HN. The top comment is worth reading: u/MichaelNolan notes that the stat '70% of committed code originating from AI' is 'to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation' -- which is a polite way of saying the number is contaminated by incentives. u/woah made the point I actually found most interesting: that blowing through hundreds of API dollars per session is trivially easy with large context windows, and either 'Anthropic is absolutely hosing API users, massively subsidizing subscriptions, or a little bit of both.' Nobody answered that. I don't have an answer either, but it's the right question. The first top comment asked if the whole article is a submarine, and I'm not going to pretend that's not a reasonable thing to wonder.

Also circulating: Kimi K2.6 winning a coding challenge against the closed frontier names. The comments are appropriately cautious -- 'a single challenge,' one script vs. another, setup unclear. Not nothing, but not a benchmark to restructure your stack around.

The AI water use piece got 377 comments mostly because u/dado3212 dropped a clip of someone telling Pete Buttigieg it takes '10,000 gallons just to generate one photo.' The actual numbers are much lower. Useful to have in your pocket if you're tired of that talking point.

-- the cat